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Ep. 143: AI-Powered Content Automation, Creative Personalization with Andrew Swinand
00:29:13
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- [00:01]
Andrew Swinand
This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.
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AdTech God
The result?
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Andrew Swinand
Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more@accenture.com Spotify this episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, Compatibility and availability
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AdTech God
Various 18 welcome to the ADTech Godpod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTech God. Welcome to the AdTech God Pod where we speak to the leaders of our industry. Today we're joined by one of the advertising industry's most respected leaders, Andrew Swinand, the CEO of Inspired Thinking Group, otherwise known as itg. Over the course of his career, Andrew has led some of the world's most influential marketing organizations, serving as CEO of Publicis Group, Creative, and Chairman and CEO of Leo Burnett. He's helped shape brands, agencies and truly the broader marketing industry during periods of lots of change, including the one that we're going through today, which is the rise of AI across both operational and the creative gen AI piece. So I do not know Andrew. He was introduced to me a few weeks ago so I'm really looking forward to meeting him today. Andrew, thanks for joining me.
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Andrew Swinand
Excited to be here and I will tell everyone God has a countdown before he starts. So you know, it's, it's, it was seven days and five seconds to to do all the work.
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AdTech God
So I would love to change it to a seven day countdown, send it to you a week prior, just be like, just so you know, make a choice. So you know this starts in seven days.
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Andrew Swinand
Yeah. And at the end of the podcast you could just rest, just have like a silent silence.
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AdTech God
So it's officially the Sabbath. That's it. Sorry guys, it's over. Andrew, thank you for joining me today. I really do appreciate it. Looking at your background, it's very impressive and I love the fact that you've worked so closely with creative. So thanks again for joining me.
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Andrew Swinand
Thrilled to be here.
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AdTech God
I would love to hear it from you. You currently are the CEO of itg, but I like to take it back. So I like to understand people's journey through their career and what brought them to the point that they're at today. So I'd love to hear a little bit about your background and what made you join ITG and what was that like, determining factor that got you there?
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Andrew Swinand
Sure. I, you know, it's interesting. I am someone who's never known what they wanted to be when I grew up, so it's a little bit of a circuitous route, you know, interesting. I actually joined the army when I was 17. I had good grades and no money, so, you know, as an infantry platoon leader, but army paid for me to go to Penn and Wharton, thus the good grades and no money part. But, you know, I got it done. The Army. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. And you know, my mom was an artist and my dad had worked in business, so I thought advertising would be good. I applied alphabetically and got a job at BBDO and kind of started the whole thing. So it was that much forethought. You know, my. My boss at BBDO was from P and G and encouraged me to go there. So I went to work at Proctor in the 90s, was a brand manager and beauty care and got involved in what was reflect.com in 98, which was P&G's first kind of venture into E commerce. And it was funny because at the time it was Internet was brand new and no one knew anything. So a group of us went to San Francisco to start doing E commerce for Proctor. You know, ton of fun, but, you know, market crash. Proctor decided the Internet wasn't a thing and kind of started looking for what was next and ended up sending an email to everyone I know saying I'm looking for a digital job. Leo Burnett was our agency at the time and a friend there introduced me to a new company called Starcom, which was about a month old and ended up meeting a guy named Rashad Tabakawala who was starting the digital group brand new within Starcom, which was brand new. And so I joined and Starcom, we grew to 6,000 people, became the world's largest media agency. I became the global president of what was Starcom Media Vest. And it was turned out digital was a thing and knowing it was helpful so was doing that for over a decade. Flip side of that, traveling about 500,000 miles a year. We were rolling up Proctor and Samsung and all these Global accounts, but had a young family and decided to leave. So I started a venture incubator in Chicago called Abundant Ventures. I founded nine companies and have sold seven. First was a company we sold in the analytics space to Dentsu Publicis. Has bought two companies I've started which brought me back to the group to lead Leo Burnett. And then as punishment for my sins, I got Saatchi and all the other creative agencies in production and did that for about a decade. Which brings me to itg. It was interesting. I was watching what was possible with AI enabled content, you know, and was sitting on a team of 6,000 creatives, very little technology and realized I was the E, not the or in disintermediation. My earn out was done and was looking for what was next and actually left with a whole thesis on how to leverage AI powered content automation for competitive advantage. Was meeting with private equity, met Bridgepoint who said, we just rolled this up, it's called itg. Would you move to London and lead it? And a few years later here I am. You know, we had, we've added about a thousand people in the last 18 months. We had no presence in the U.S. we're now 500 plus. But it's been a ton of fun, learning new things and you know, being much more on the cutting edge of, of technology. But again, all that history with traditional, creative, traditional brand startups all coming into play.
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AdTech God
So what exactly does ITG do in the market for those who are, who are listening? And what gap are you guys filling with that creative process that AI is able to assist with today that maybe you didn't have five years ago or even three years ago?
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Andrew Swinand
It's not even three years ago. We do AI powered content automation so it will produce over 200 million assets this year. A great example is, you know, if you think about like a Heineken, you know, a creative agency will come up with the hero idea, you know, max von strappen heineken 0 in a bar we will then take those assets, Translate it to 53 languages, 160 different countries, you know, bar in Barcelona, bar in Bangkok, bar in Berlin, bar in Brooklyn. All generated through AI translations through AI. And we have a whole content marketing platform called storytek which basically does AI enabled content management and content automation from digital asset management to workflow through content automation reviews and approvals. So we help brands actually AI enable their content ecosystem.
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AdTech God
How much has that improved on the efficiency side? Because I would assume that prior to this this was all manually done. As you mentioned, multiple countries, multiple Bars, same messaging, but multiple countries, multiple bars. And having to go through and change the creative and translate the creative for every single one would be time wasted really for something that can easily be done and turned around quickly with AI.
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Andrew Swinand
Mind numbing work. Mind numbing work. And again, kind of the sweet spot, global CPG brands or retail QSR auto where you have a lot of localization. And the story I always tell is, was leading one of the group, was leading one of the largest auto brands. You know, they were producing about 66,000 assets and we had 450 FDs working on the business. So you think about that, you know, hero and Halo content, you know, from a hero standpoint, you know, we probably produced 20 big new ideas. You know, creative conceptual, you know, Led Zeppelin soundtrack, you know, truck driving through the desert. Of that we produced 65,980 Peoria dealer tags, Pittsburgh tags, all of the stuff that went around it. And you know, it was interesting, you know, 6,000 some odd people in my group, probably 50 were like hot creatives coming up with can ideas. The others were doing a lot of the stuff. So again we're able to automate a lot of this with AI, but you know, we're 300 plus clients now on average, we're cutting cost in half. We're reducing lead times from you know, eight weeks to two weeks. But what's more, because we're able to reinvest in personalization, we have a whole AI enabled intelligence suite that actually grades content at the object level to tell you what works and what doesn't. That actually helps inform what to make. But we have a three times increase in response rates by doing more personalized content at scale.
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AdTech God
So on the efficiency side, this, this speeds up production or, and go to market for anything that you do. So that lead up time has been chopped down to two weeks. How much creative are are these brands actually doing now? I mean is this, is this sparking the idea of hey, let's get even more personalized than we've ever done before? Because we don't need you know, 20 people writing or typing this out. We can now churn these out in two weeks and we can get even more customized. So rather than county, we're doing city instead of city, we're doing the street that you're on and we can get very personalized for every auto dealer.
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Andrew Swinand
Exactly.
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AdTech God
We have our automotive client that we have.
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Andrew Swinand
That's exactly it. And you know, I used to, I like to joke, you know, it used to be like better, faster, cheaper, pick Two, now it's better, faster, cheaper, take three. You know, everyone could go for the hat trick. The thing I think is interesting too though. We work with like a global technology brand, 33 different markets. They old agency for a seven digit fee was producing 14 videos to run across the 33 markets. You know, we were able to produce 1400 in two weeks for a couple hundred thousand. And again, with 1400 videos you could basically target different SMBs, you could feature different products. So again, significant increase in response rates and efficacy, which makes sense if you follow it through. You know, I think it's interesting how you run media agencies and creative agencies. You know, Google, 55,000 different attributes you can buy programmatically. You met a 22,000 attributes you could buy programmatically. If I have 14 videos, how much am I really leveraging that? You know, with 1400 you can start getting much more specific to marry content context and increase engagement.
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AdTech God
I would think that if someone sees a creative and it's not relevant and not of interest to them, they move on. But having that many options to cycle through and present to a potential consumer really gives you the power to be able to create the right type of ad for the right type of person. And it really kind of hits it the nail on the head of like, right time, right person, right creative. If it didn't work, let's cycle through another one. And it just feels like this is probably one of the biggest CMOS challenges in the market, which is, you know, you put all your eggs in one basket and if it doesn't work, you're in trouble. But if you're able to cycle through all these creatives, you can now say, look, we've created this formal top level view of what we want to do, but now we have so many creative we can test and edit and pitch and pivot whatever we need to do in order to drive the impact that you're looking for for your brand. And it just feels right if done right.
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Andrew Swinand
Yeah, it's incredible too actually pre qualification. So one of the core tenets of our platform is this idea of an object oriented ecosystem. And so what we did with Storytek, what I saw was this huge trend towards generative AI and agencies are obsolete and F1 key AI creates an ad and it's magic. And I think that's such bs. And our focus has been much more on this idea of operational AI. So for storytek, we actually invested in using the AI to actually scan and classify every single image and every single asset in a client's portfolio. Or damage and actually dynamically meta tag and name every asset. And the idea behind it is actually by creating a structured framework for meta tagging, you have the ability to actually feed the LLMs and actually enable a genetic workflow. So example is, you know, we had a client that has 33 million assets in their dam. 80% of them had never been downloaded, never been touched. So again you think of like 30 some odd million assets unused. We created 160 million unique words and phrases to describe the content. Man in white shirt, man with glasses, man with blue curtains behind him. So the specificity that allows natural language processing. So what does this do? The AI actually now has the tools to work with. And what I see is people building all these agents and saying, you know, you know, we're going to generate net new content. What we're saying is organize the content you have and then I can build an agent that say changed white shirt to red shirt to blue shirt to gray shirt. Because I can name this shirt, I can find the shirt, I can use AI to strip it out and strip it in. And this is the unlock. Once you have an object oriented ecosystem, then you can do fixed and flexible automation. And again we hammer this idea of operational AI creating ROI versus, you know, rising token costs. Hallucinations of AI magic, you know, and kind of my last point on it is I think a lot of the AI magic it does well in conferences because it's sexy. But I still think people come up with the best ideas. Our thing is come up with a get a great creative agency, you know, to come up with the idea and then actually use AI for what it's good at. Organizing large amounts of unstructured data to take the actual content and make more of it and personalize it at scale.
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AdTech God
Hey everyone, this is Adtech Dodd and this is a commercial message. Here at marketecture we know what you need more of in your life. Ad tech podcasts. So I'm thrilled to tell you about the Media Ocean Podcast Network. Three different shows currently live and a bunch more launching soon. There's FemForward, a show about women in leadership, Add it Up, which is Basically Ad Tech 101 and FRAP Rap with G Dog, which defies all descriptors. Check them out@mediaocean.com podcast network. That's MediaOcean.com podcast network available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube. And thank you Media Ocean for supporting Marketexture. If you think back, even as you mentioned, I said five years, but even three years ago, this would have sounded crazy. Crazy to go through 30 million files. Crazy to be able to tag it and tag multiple things for each file that you have or image or video asset that you have to be able to do that at scale. That would have never been possible five years ago unless you had a full team.
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Andrew Swinand
It was not even close. Not even close. I mean and again you think about like so picture this, right? You have a dam, you have cyberarians who are typing in spring 2023 can campaign for shirts and that's the meta tagging. And then the media agency traffics it with Facebook post and that you get your results on Facebook posts. You don't know what the ad is. I mean it's insane what AI can do in terms of organizing construct. And again, I feel like the whole industry is overly enamored on generative and people aren't looking at what the operational efficiency is. And it's like the low hanging fruit of ROI that's right in front of front of you. So you know, again, once you can actually natural language process your 30 million some odd assets, 90% of the time we find clients already have most of the stuff they need, they just can't find it. You know again, another statistic A&A. 60% of assets produced by in house agencies are never used. 20% of in house agency time is spent looking for assets like waste on waste on waste. So again for me it's like if AI is like a laptop, it's a tool you use to increase efficiency. How do you put that backbone in place to actually organize the ecosystem and help people take better ideas and personalize them at scale?
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AdTech God
Touching up on that personalization piece. So AI has the ability to organize and structure your data. It has the ability for gen AI. Obviously it's there increased personalization as you had mentioned. But where do you think brands in particular maybe are getting wrong when it comes to personalization? Do you feel that some of them are getting too personal with their creative? Is there like the right balance of, of doing so where it's. It's effective but not creepy because there is that level of, you know, effective creative, personal creative, but then maybe a little too creepy creative?
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Andrew Swinand
Yeah, it, you know, it. For me it's a great question and kind of the way I think about is this idea of meaningful breaks. So I talked earlier about this AI enabled halo intelligence platform. What we found. So we actually have an agent that once you have all the objects named, you can actually organize the data. It then actually grades every single object against engagement and efficacy. So the agent will say, you know, white shirt performs better than blue shirt. No glasses, better than glasses. But you can look at every object and say, how effective is it? The thing we found, though, in personalization is everyone thinks personalization is like one to a billion. But what we found is it actually renders on this idea of meaningful breaks. And the story I always tell in this is we were working with a pet food manufacturer and what we found was, hey, Andrew, you own a dog matters not at all. And the thing is, is it's not like, hey, Andrew helps or hurts. It was an irrelevant thing. But that said, the meaningful breaks are actually things where engagement or efficacy increases. So big dogs versus little dogs, old dogs versus puppies, overweight dogs, athletic dogs. So people are actually looking for which products best align to the pet they have. And what we use the AI intelligence to inform are what are the meaningful breaks that link to the 55,000 attributes you can plan through Google and then you customize content against those meaningful breaks to maximize efficacy. And that's the unlock. And the thing that's interesting is it's not one to a billion. It's like one to 20, but it's knowing which 20 really matter when it
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AdTech God
comes down to efficacy of an ad, when it comes to performance and effectiveness overall for what you're creating. Do you think that maybe this is a currently, like, underestimated value of AI? Because I feel like everybody talks about optimized, like in my world, programmatic optimization, streamlining the way you manage a campaign. We tend to forget about creative in the ad tech world. Like, all we're focused about is outcomes, outcomes, outcomes. We do not focus heavily on creative. But do you feel like we're missing this aspect, which is ads matter. Creative matters.
- [20:24]
Andrew Swinand
I feel like ITG and storytek were a little ahead of the market. And the thing is, again, you look at every piece of every MMM ever done, it's 60 to 70% of the efficacy is the content. But I think again, the evolution is using AI to actually understand and pre qualify your content. What are the meaningful breaks? Who are the audiences of opportunity? What objects, images, words or phrases have the highest efficacy? And then actually customizing those and linking them to the programmatic buys, that's the unlock. But again, I think, you know, can. Last year it was all about, look, I put a monkey on a horse drinking a Coke. Is an AI incredible. But it's not the big idea, right? You know, it's not. It's not the problem we're trying to solve. It's not Like Cokes, like, oh my God, if only I could put a monkey on a horse drinking it would make my ad so much better, you know? And yes, I want to acknowledge, like, you can produce new things. Generative AI can create opportunities. I'm not against generative, but for me, it's not the big idea and it's not the big path to roi.
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AdTech God
Andrew, how do you think the agency world will look different a few years from now? We've seen change across the entire agency kind of landscape so far. We've seen some layoffs. We've seen also some hiring happen, especially people who are AI savvy and very familiar with the technology piece. But where do you think the agency business will go and what does it look like in the future?
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Andrew Swinand
Oh, first, and I feel strongly about this, I actually think we're going to go through a creative renaissance. In a world where you can make anything higher quality content matters. And the analogy I always use with this, it's like publishing, right? So. So the thing that ended up happening is high quality publishing. New York Times, Wall Street Journal actually are premium and are exploding because people still want high quality edited content. So I actually think you're going to see more and more efficacy and more and more investment in creative ideas. So because you can produce so much AI slop, and that is still, I think, going to be a human endeavor. So, one, creative renaissance. Two, I actually think brands are going to basically look at actually bringing more in house and consolidating ecosystems because of what's possible with technology. And again, to my auto example, I don't need 450 FTEs. I can do it with much fewer people. You're going to have more strategists, more quality control designers, copywriters who are actually looking at human understanding. But I have less people cranking out 4,000 banners. So I think you're going to see a movement up the value chain of creative strategy insight. There's still people involved, but they're going to be doing much more thinking and pulling the levers than staying up all night. Moving the logo three inches to the
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AdTech God
left, slightly changing the curve of the
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Andrew Swinand
letter R. The curve R. So true.
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AdTech God
Because I. Yeah, that happened to me the other day. I was working on something internally and I'm like, know what? I'm just paying someone to do this because I've spent an hour and a half trying to align this and it's not working. Like, it's going to cost me a few bucks. I'm just going to send it to the pro to do it. So there's a. You mentioned AI slop and there is a lot of AI slop. I see it everywhere. And people are using AI correctly in many aspects. Many times they're also not. But this is also creating like an explosion of content. It's been unreal how much content has been creative, both on social platforms, on written content, audio content. You don't even know sometimes what is real and what isn't real. Do you think this kind of overwhelms marketers today and brands today, or do you think this is just kind of the learning curve of an introduction of a new technology and it just takes time for people to, to get comfortable with it?
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Andrew Swinand
You know my analogy, it's. And for those of you who are old enough, if you remember the Internet, when banners first came out, it was like, oh my God, banners. And like, you know, and then, you know, we had web pages with 50 banners on them. And people are cranking it out because they could. I think you're, you know, and again, the market corrected. I think it's going to be a similar. Where people are going to be like, this is all crap. I need a really good idea. And I think you're going to basically see the pendulum swing back. And again, high quality insight, LED ideas, but then personalized and replicated across audience as people look for things that are relevant. And again, this is where I think the operational AI, you know, the intelligence to know what to make. The organizing or basically asset management layer that actually names the objects you have so you can access them and not waste money on producing stuff you already have. And then the orchestration layer that brings it all together is really the unlock for an agentic future. It's just, it's interesting. I always joke about this. I feel like whenever I go to a conference, it's like we're talking about architecture and meta tagging and infrastructure for AI enablement. And it's like everyone's excited and like, oh my God, did you see the monkey on the horse drinking the coke? You know, it's. It's not as sexy, but it is the path to roi. You know, one of my jokes, you can't spell ROI without boring. You know, it's, it's the less exciting, but I think it's where, where the true path to success lies.
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AdTech God
It's like the generative AI. Boom. And then we had the Coca Cola commercial and every semi truck had different number of wheels. And then it wasn't the ad that went viral, it was all the errors in the Creative that went viral, where people were like, did you notice that in this scene the Same truck had 18 wheels, but in this one it had an extra wheel? And you look and you're like, we're not there yet to just blindly trust generative AI, but to utilize it for minor edits and mass production, like, it's definitely powerful. Absolutely. We'll see. Where, where do you think things are going to be in five years? I know it's hard to forecast with how quickly this stuff changes, but where do you see the creative process going in five years? And if you have already spoken to it, maybe we could even talk about what people are overhyping when it comes to AI and creative.
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Andrew Swinand
Yeah, I mean, I think you're going to see, you know, if you have traditional right now creative media production, then your digital agency is Holdco, everybody. I think what you're going to see is you're. You're going to have creative entities, but they're going to be really focused on conceptualization and ideas. You're going to have, I think, an explosion of influencer and influencer management, which I think we're already seeing. But then I think that brands will have this whole content ecosystem where basically it's foundational in technology like storytek, but is actually taking those ideas and personalizing them for stores, dealerships, countries. And then you're going to have a distribution partner, which is, you know, I think going to be a combination of media agencies and in house, which is going to be leveraging the platforms and AI as an enabling tool to basically discover, find an optimized audience. But I think that's where the world is going and the idea of shopper agency, digital agency, social agency, I think will fall away.
- [27:57]
AdTech God
Awesome. This has been great, Andrew. Thank you so much for joining me today. I didn't know what to expect going into this convo because I don't usually talk to the creative side of the industry. But this has been a fantastic chat. So thank you for taking time out of your day.
- [28:09]
Andrew Swinand
I really enjoyed it and yeah, me too. So awesome.
- [28:13]
AdTech God
Thank you so much.
- [28:14]
Andrew Swinand
All right, thank you.
- [28:16]
AdTech God
Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the AdTech Godpod, a podcast for the people about the people. Stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of ad tech. Don't miss out on the latest updates. So follow me on X Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget ATG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of adtech innovation.